now i would like to teach a lesson to both sides: in order to disagree with someone, it is not necessary to regard them as being, or to declare them to be, stupid and crazy. it helps, of course, if you never expose yourself to those crazy stupid people at all; it helps if you have no idea what they're saying. you know perfectly well what they're saying, because people like you are telling one another that it's stupid and crazy. sometimes you say that you literally can't listen for a moment to the people who disagree with you: can't watch a republican debate or trump speech, for example, can't watch fox news even for a moment. otherwise you might fly off the handle, i guess. then you're probably going to preen yourself on your open-mindedness, your rationality, and the notion that your politics is based in reality, even as you enact precisely the reverse of that all day every day. seriously, are you actually afraid to watch a trump speech? how insecure are your beliefs? guess what? they think the same about y'all, with just as much information. if i point out that trump is palpably anything but stupid, or praise his self-presentation, it's like i agreed with him about muslims or something. no, i didn't. and this thing where political disagreements are framed in terms of total hostility and condescension to the people who disagree with you is not only mob irrationality, it has managed to separate the country into two epistemic/verbalabuse zones. ok, he's stupid and crazy, etc, and he's sneaking up on you to kick your damn ass. resolve to try to face and actually understand what's actually going on instead of just groveling for membership in an irrationalist cult. ok?
just start right here: people as intelligent as you, people more intelligent than you, people as informed as you, people more informed than you, people as rational as you, people more rational than you, people as decent as you, people more decent than you, may disagree with you politically. and guess what? you might still be right. argue with them, instead of spending all day playing polkas on the ad hominem harmonium, instead of spending all day in an ecstasy of self-congratulation.
on the left, it's really often presented as an iq contest, and one might spend eight years seemingly obsessed with the the intelligence quotient of a reagan or george w. watching george w and john kerry debate you notice (a) that they were both the product of the same educational institutions and (b) that they both notably struggled all day every day to express themselves clearly, much less creatively. and yet sometimes you thought that the left thought that the reason to vote for kerry was that he was smarter, demonstrated i guess by agreement with themselves.
